Office Space $50 to $75 per Sq Ft in NYC

What this band buys across the city right now

The twenty floors are three products, not one. Desk counts assume 175 square feet per person.

• Large plates above 17,000 feet: One Soho Square's partial 2nd, 27,344 at $68, about $154,949 a month and 156 desks; 275 Seventh Avenue's entire 24th, 18,668 at $63; the 12th floor penthouse at 151 West 26th Street, 17,610 at $56 and $82,180; 1450 Broadway's entire 4th, 17,296 at $65.
• Full floors of 5,250 to 12,500 feet at $50 to $72, where most of the band lives: 1239 Broadway's entire 12th, 12,500 at $62, built for a team of 75 to 80, and 127 West 26th Street's entire 7th, 9,500 at $50, tied for the cheapest foot here with 213 West 35th Street's 5,250 foot 10th.
• Suites under 4,000 feet, all furnished, wired or prebuilt: 54 West 21st Street's 3,960 at $72, a sublease with 36 sit-stand workstations, and 29 West 17th Street's 2,500 at $60, plug and play at $12,500 a month.

The monthly math, worked plainly

Rent is quoted per rentable square foot per year, so the monthly figure is one multiplication and one division, and it runs on any floor here. 1450 Broadway is 17,296 times $65, $1,124,240 a year, $93,687 a month. One Soho Square is 27,344 times $68, $1,859,392, or $154,949.

What a dollar of negotiation is worth follows the footprint, not the rate: a dollar off One Soho Square is $27,344 a year, the same dollar at 29 West 17th Street is $2,500.

Per desk it collapses to one number: at 175 square feet a person, each dollar of asking rent is about $14.58 a seat a month, so this band runs $729 to $1,050 per desk. Those footages are rentable, not usable, so we compare cost per usable seat off a measured plan.

What the asking rent does not include

Budgets in this band break underneath the asking rent, on five costs outside it.

• Electric is rarely in base rent, arriving as a submeter or a fixed $2 to $4 a foot a year, $19,000 to $38,000 at 127 West 26th Street, eight percent on top of a $50 rent.
• Cleaning is read line by line, since nightly service covers desks and trash while pantry cleanup, interior glass and debris are carved out.
• Tax escalations run from a base year fixed in the lease, and that base year matters more than the percentage: one struck before full assessment bills for real by year three.
• Operating expense pass-throughs sit on top of the annual step in base rent itself, commonly 2.5 to 3 percent, which at 1450 Broadway is $33,727 in year two.
• Buildout above any allowance is the largest of the five and likeliest to go missing from a model: everything past it is cash or amortized into rent, and DOB filing sets your move-in date.

What actually moves at these rents

Asking rent is a position, not a price, and what moves is terms, since the number signed gets quoted against the next floor.

• Free rent goes first, costing ownership a stretch of income rather than a permanently lower rent roll: a month is $39,583 at 127 West 26th Street, $154,949 at One Soho Square.
• An allowance beats a dollar off the rate where work is needed. At 104 West 27th Street ownership will build to suit, so we price the scope, fix the delivery date and put a miss on a rent clock.
• On the furnished and prebuilt floors, 1235 Broadway, 32 Old Slip and 45 Broadway among them, get the furniture in writing with an inventory, and a surrender clause that does not make you restore a condition the floor never had.
• Two of the twenty are subleases with dates, 54 West 21st Street to June 2027, with a possible direct extension, and 29 West 17th Street to September 2027. Both are quick, and best taken with the landlord conversation running alongside; trade the years past five for a renewal formula.

How the band sits against the city and each submarket

The median across our New York book is $75 a foot, and the dearest floors in this band ask $72, so the band runs to within three dollars of the city median and stops there. What it buys depends entirely on where you point it.

In the value submarkets it is the whole market: Penn Plaza's median is $52 with its two floors asking $50 and $52, Chelsea's is $59 with six of its seven floors inside the band, and all three NoMad floors are in it. There the budget buys nearly everything available, with only 2 Penn Plaza at $135 and the Empire State Building at $90 sitting above it.

Point it at the expensive submarkets and it buys the way in, nothing else. SoHo's median is $98 and only one of its nine floors lands here, One Soho Square's 27,344 foot partial 2nd at $68. Union Square's is $87.50 against one 2,500 foot sublease, and Midtown's $79, where 1450 Broadway at $65 is the entry. Grand Central sits at $80.50, Flatiron $72, FiDi $71.50, Bryant Park $95.50 with a single floor in the band, and only Midtown and Hudson Yards hold nothing at all.

So the budget reaches nine of eleven submarkets, which is the least useful way to read it: in five it reaches a choice of floors, in the other four exactly one. A single option is not a negotiation.